The Harmful Effects of Premarital Sex

Introduction

The topic that our group had chosen is Premarital sex. Premarital sex is a sexual activity that people practice before they married. Some religions or cultures will see premarital sex as an taboo or sin, it was also considered as an moral issues in society. Due to the changes of time, premarital sex has becoming more widely accepted by most of the people, especially in Western countries.

Nowadays, many young generations already tried premarital sex because they think that having premarital sex is a meaning of matured. Besides matured, the young generations are curious about premarital sex. Movies that they watch usually will have some of these scenes, it makes the young generation more desired to try what is the feel of premarital sex. One of the reasons they try premarital sex is also caused by their environment, such as peer pressure. For example, their friends would have tried having sexual intercourse with someone else and they will tell about the feelings, this will easily influence them to try the feeling of having sexual intercourse with their partner at a young age. Premarital sex will bring bad effects to people. Premarital sex will cause pregnant in early age and if the youngsters could not afford to take care of the baby, it will be a big problem for them to continue their living. Pregnant during early age will attract the strange vision of the outsider to the pregnant woman, this will make the pregnant woman gain more stress and will cause mental sick easily.

Furthermore, premarital sex will let the people who tried, risk the infection of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) or AIDS (Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). People may have this disease in their whole life just because they tried premarital sex. Premarital sex will also bring many negative and bad problems to human. However, in Malaysia, a research was conducted to find out premarital sexual intercourse among adolescents, who are among 12 to 19 years old young adults. The study showed that 5.4 percent of the total sample were reported to have had sexual intercourse. The proportion among male students who had sex was higher (9.5 percent), compared with female students, (2.9 percent). Based on the statistics that were found out, the average age at Malaysian young adults have their first sexual intercourse was 15 years. One percent of students reported that they had been pregnant or had made someone else pregnant (Lee LK, 2006). Furthermore, the research also found out that, the percentage of unmarried young Malaysians aged 13 to 24 years who were engaged in sexual activity increase from 2% in 2004 to 4.8% in 2014 (John, 2018). Police statistics also show that 517 cases were reported between 2005 and January 2011. Figures up to 2016 show that on average, 100 babies were dumped every year with more than half found dead and others suffering horrifying circumstances, including being thrown from multi-storey buildings or flushed down the toilet (John, 2018).

As a conclusion for the statistics and data that are stated above, we are going to promote a few media strategies to reject the statement of premarital sex. The reason we are rejecting the statement is because we think that premarital sex is very harmful for young adults, they might get diseases such as HIV and AIDS. Unprotected premarital sex may also cause young adults to get unplanned pregnancy in young age and this will cause them mental issues if it was not settled properly. Therefore, we are promoting three media strategies to prevent premarital sex, which is short film, talk show and campaign.

Media Strategies

Proposal 1: Short Film

The strategy that we suggested is to produce a short film within 10minute.A short film is a video that make within 40minute, cannot recognized as feature film. The short film aims to let people straight away get the main point of the story and what the story wants to tell. People can spare a few minutes to watch the short film when they are having a break and understand what the short film wanted to portrait shortly. It reflects what the current issue happened in real life. Short film compared to PSA will bring more reality to the public because of the synopsis of the story. We choose young teenagers especially at 12-18 age for our target audience to aware them to protect themselves from the premarital sex that might affect the rest of their life.

In our story, we will start with a female teenager sitting on a chair and holding a baby in her arms. She started to flash back what she had gone through her life. 12 month ago, she brought her playful boyfriend back to her home. Her parents noticed and advised her that she should not have a relationship with a playful boy, and she should protect herself at this age. She argued with her parents and didn’t take the advice of her parents. She ran away from home with her boyfriend. One day, her boyfriend asked the girl to have sex with him, but the girl refused to have premarital sex with him. She started to recall back what her parents told her before not to have relationship at her age. The boy threatens her if she refuses to have sex with him, they will break up immediately. The girl has no choice but to agree with the boy. 2 months later, she found out herself pregnant with the pregnancy tests and she went to hospital to have deeper checking. She gets shocked when she had a report that claim that she had HIV disease. She went back home but the boy had already run away and leaves her alone with HIV disease. At the end, the girl felt regret, but she decided to give birth to the baby because life is worthy, nothing can be regret once she did.

Moreover, the propaganda that we used for this short film will be black propaganda. Black propaganda showed out the disadvantage and the effect of the premarital sex to the public. We use a short film to show out the process about how the teenager did, how she had been affecting her life after the premarital sex only for a short term of happiness. We used the story to tell people that the imagination of theirs are totally differs in reality. We hope to prevent more innocent young teenagers to get involved with premarital sex and get rid of being a single parent. With this strategy, we also bring out that the unwanted pregnancies and unprotected sex will lead to long-term consequences and physical metal health. For example, the girl was pregnant when her boyfriend left her, it will cause her to have a large impact on her life and the trauma will never be erased.

The first propaganda technique will be transfer. Transfer is a technique that aware the public by pictures or videos. We use transfer to provoke the negative emotion to the public. We use a video format to tell the audience about the story. We also transfer the important messages to the audiences. We will use the real story that happened in real life to reproduce it into a short film. It is to make the audiences to feel the same feeling and emotion that will cause them sympathy and dispose of premarital sex.

Therefore, the second propaganda technique will be bandwagon. Bandwagon is the usage of idea of everyone else is doing it, and so should an individual do it in the same way. In this society, we know that premarital sex issue had been followed by the trends and it became normal in real life. Every teenager around 12 years old to 18 years old will have their own terms of adolescent rebellion. People who had gone through did not have chances to tell the young generation about premarital sex. Furthermore, there are some of the film industries produce a lot of videos about premarital sex in this generation, and it makes people try to attempt it. Due to this reason, we try to produce a short film about preventing premarital sex and tell them, the disadvantage of the incident if they get involved.

Lastly, we will be applying the Magic Bullet Theory as our theory. The short film that was produced will be uploaded to YouTube and Facebook as well. People will watch it and share it. Sharing short film reach to millions of people rapidly. There, people will get influence and understand how harmful it will be if they had premarital sex at young ages or unprotected sex. They will be frightened out and protected themselves from being one of the victims.

Proposal 2: Talk Show

The second media strategy that we decided to use is television talk shows. Talk show is a television programme that involves a person or a group of people discussing various topics. We decided to use talk show as our media strategy to reject premarital sex is because people tend to trust more on talk shows. Our target audience for this talk show is teenagers and young adults aged between 13-25 years old. Our topic for this talk show will be “The Premarital Sex among Young Adults”. The duration of this talk show is 60 minutes.

For our talk show, we will have two host to host the show, and they will introduce to the audience what is premarital sex. Then, they will also talk about their point of views towards young adults’ premarital sex. Besides, we will also invite professional doctors to interview them and let them tell the audiences is it good or bad to practice premarital sex in young age. Furthermore, there will also be a comment section and call-in session to let our audience to have the chance to participate in the talk show and gives comment and advice to the young adults towards premarital sex. Other than that, we will also talk about the abortion and baby dumping cases that happened in Malaysia.

The type of propaganda we use for this media strategy is grey propaganda. Grey propaganda is the transmission of information or ideas that might be true and might not be, so we will not only talk about only the good things about premarital sex, but more towards the bad side. In the talk show, we will invite doctors to our show and talk about the good side of premarital sex firstly, then tell them about the harmfulness of premarital sex. We chose grey propaganda is because we think that in this modern society, everyone has their own opinion towards premarital sex, most of the people nowadays are very widely accepting it. Instead of fully rejecting premarital sex, it would be better if we educate and give them a correct informations or advices through the talk show with some professional doctors.

For the propaganda techniques, we will use fear and testimonial. Fear is an emotion of human and this propaganda technique can be applied effectively to drive audiences’ feelings and emotions. The reason we chose fear as our propaganda technique is because having premarital sex in early age will bring many disease and health issues. We will show audiences about the research statistics and tell them about the consequences of having premarital sex in young age.

Our next propaganda technique is testimonial. Testimonial is the usage of statement from a well-known source or person to gain credibility to the statement. In our talk show, we have professional doctors to talk about the premarital sex. This may be very effective to let the audience believe what the doctor told, and they will engage more information and knowledge about the premarital sex. Thus, they will learn how to protect themselves if they study about the consequences of premarital sex.

Lastly, we will use Freudianism theory in this media strategy. Freudianism theory believes that the human behavior is the product of the conflict between the individuals. We chose Freudianism theory is because we believe that everyone has their own perspective towards premarital sex. Some people can accept but some people cannot accept, it is depending on the individual’s level of education, living environment, peers around them and so on. We cannot aim to change their mind and force them to totally avoid sexuality but to instill more knowledge about the premarital sex.

Proposal 3: Campaign

The third media strategy that we decided to use is campaign. Campaign is an event that organized towards a particular aim by involving a team of people. The campaign is to let more people understand about the importance of self-protect and the disadvantage of premarital sex. We decided to use campaign as our media strategy to reject premarital sex is to let people know more about the disadvantage of premarital sex. This is because nowadays, most of the people do not go for exercise and always stay at home with their electronic device. So, we share this information through media to let more people know about this campaign and hope more people could come and join our activities in this campaign.

Our target audience for this campaign is teenagers which they are aged between 13 to 17 years old. We target the teenagers is because they are easier to influence by their surroundings and by their friends. Teenagers must be more alert about the knowledge of this area so they could avoid many unnecessary mistakes. The duration for this campaign will be 6 hours. This campaign will be having a few activities and games about how we will feel if we had a baby. The participants will be attending all the activities and games through these 6 hours by hanging a bag with an egg inside it. The egg that those participants bring along, represents a baby. Our campaign shares this information by using an egg is just want the teenagers to understand how it feels and what they can do if they have a baby in real life.

Besides, raise a child is not that easy and is not like what you imagine. We will let the teenagers to know that they must make efforts and sacrifice a lot of things if they want to raise a child during young age. We will also make the teenagers understand how hard and exhausting will it be when we raise a child without any income and while we are still studying. During the activities, the egg must not be broken. If the egg had been broken, the participant will be disqualified because we want them to know the importance of a life. The propaganda type for this media strategy is black. Black propaganda is a discussion of falsehood. Black propaganda can be right or wrong, but the meaning will be explained by the reasons of the explanation. Our media strategy choose black for propaganda is because we want to show the disadvantage of premarital sex to the public. We use campaign to share this information is to hope the teenagers could focus more on the disadvantage of the premarital sex. We will let them understand more about the importance of life and should not try premarital sex during young age. We hope this campaign could prevent the teenagers to become parents at a young age and while they do not have any income to raise a child.

Next, the propaganda techniques that we use is fear and plain folks. Fear is an emotion that everyone will feel when they fear something. We use fear as our propaganda techniques is to hope that our campaign could let the teenagers know how big issue it is if they try premarital sex and have a baby at a young age. Moreover, we will also tell the teenagers to protect a life. If they have a baby at a young age, they may have an idea about abortion. The meaning of abortion is killing a life that stays in your body. This may cause them to become a person with murder behavior.

The next propaganda techniques that we use for campaign is plain folks. Plain folks is a way to tell the public the disadvantage of premarital sex by the person who experienced it before. We will invite a few guests that experienced premarital sex and let them tell about their own stories. The guests that we invite may be a single parent, divorced mum or a married parent. Last but not least, we will use magic bullet theory in this media strategy. Magic bullet theory is a theory that could immediately influence a person. The theory could shape or change the person mindset after telling them their opinion. We use magic bullet theory is because the campaign will straight influence the teenagers by letting them to understand what the disadvantage is and what are the consequences of premarital sex. The campaign could also affect the teenagers faster and more efficient.

Conclusion

For the conclusion of our topic, we reject the statement of premarital sex. Media should avoid premarital sex with the strength that they have through media platform. Media platform could reach millions of people in a country, so spreading the information through media could influence more teenagers not to involved in this current issues. Media could also share the disadvantage of premarital sex to prevent the teenagers making the wrong decision.